$20M In ONE Day?! (#544)
01 Feb 2024 (10 months ago)
- The entrepreneur launched a product with high demand.
- He limited access to 5,000 people.
- This generated $20 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) on the first day of the product launch.
Follow Up Boss sold for $500M (1m0s)
- Follow-up Boss, a real estate CRM platform, was founded by Dan 12 years ago.
- The idea for Follow-up Boss came from Dan reading complaints about real estate software in Facebook groups.
- Dan partnered with a developer friend to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and marketed the software by engaging in Facebook groups and offering help to potential customers.
- Follow-up Boss bootstrapped its entire operation and reached $28 million in annual revenue with less than 100 employees before being acquired for $500 million ($400 million upfront and $100 million earnout).
- Hampton recommends checking a company's public record of revenue, such as searching for "follow-up boss revenue" on Google, to find publicly available information.
OpenAI's new App Store (35m0s)
- OpenAI has created an App Store, similar to the iPhone App Store.
- The pricing for developers has not been announced yet.
- One company that the speaker invested in is considering creating a plugin for the OpenAI App Store.
- This could be an inflection moment for the company, similar to how the App Store was for companies like Pandora and BetterHelp.
- The speaker compares the potential of the OpenAI App Store to the success of companies like Honey and Grammarly, which utilized the Chrome Store.
- Zinga, a company that utilized the Facebook platform, is mentioned as an example of a successful company that emerged from a platform's app store.
Vertical Google for research papers (39m0s)
- Consensus.app is an AI-powered app that summarizes and synthesizes scientific papers, making it a verticalized Google specifically for scientific research.
- OpenAI is subsidizing the compute costs, increasing its accessibility for users.
- Despite initial skepticism, the product has shown remarkable improvement and potential for success, surpassing Canva as the leading GPT.
- The company is experimenting with payment terms for developers who create apps for the platform.
- Consensus.app is part of a trend of companies capitalizing on the recent surge in AI popularity.
- Investors who missed out on OpenAI are now investing in competitors like Stable Diffusion and Perplexity, leading to inflated valuations.
- The speaker expresses skepticism about these inflated valuations, drawing parallels to similar situations in the crypto and mobile industries.
- The speaker suggests that the company mentioned in the email conversation two years ago might be the same company being discussed.
Joe Speiser's hyper-growth to failure (51m30s)
- Joe Speiser, a successful entrepreneur, sold his first company, an adtech company, for hundreds of millions of dollars at a young age.
- He started a pet food company called Pet Flow, but faced competition from Chewy, which aggressively invested in customer acquisition.
- To grow Pet Flow, Speiser created a blog about pets that quickly gained popularity, becoming the most shared website on Facebook, surpassing major publishers like Viral Nova, BuzzFeed, and HuffPost.
- Within four years, Pet Flow reached $90 million in revenue and had 250 million unique monthly visitors to its website.
- Speiser and his team built a $250,000 studio in anticipation of Facebook Live's growth, planning to capitalize on the platform's potential.
- However, Facebook changed its strategy, leading to the collapse of Pet Flow. Within six to seven months, the company laid off its employees and shut down.
- Speiser's story highlights the risks and uncertainties of entrepreneurship, despite the valuable lessons learned from failure.
Partnership agreements (54m30s)
- Joe Rogan and his guest discuss the qualities of a harmonious partnership, emphasizing the importance of energy, integrity, and intelligence in a partner.
- Energy is considered the easiest to spot and a must-have quality. Rogan mentions his positive experience working with someone who had high energy.
- Look for people who are self-driven, take quick action, and are constantly thinking about their work. Their energy should come naturally and not require external motivation.
- Assess their skills and expertise in specific areas. Identify individuals who excel in selling, building, or consistently pushing projects forward.
- Integrity is the most challenging trait to evaluate. Consider talking to their previous colleagues or asking questions to gauge their honesty and behavior when faced with opportunities for selfishness.
- Working with someone on a small project before committing to a larger partnership can provide valuable insights into their work ethic and compatibility.